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Review: 'Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington' by Terry Teachout

Teachout's flawed attempt to deconstruct a genius

Howard Reich

November 10, 2013

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Even among the pantheon of jazz composers, Duke Ellington looms large, his staggering output unmatched in size or breadth. Hit songs, solo piano pieces, ensemble tone poems, stage musicals, film scores, vast orchestral works — few musical formats of the 20th century went unaddressed by Ellington.

Though anyone who pens upward of 1,700 compositions inevitably will produce trivialities as well as triumphs, Ellington's list of jazz masterpieces reaches wider than anyone else's, partly because of his obvious genius and partly because his career stretched so long: from his professional debut in 1917 to shortly before his death in 1974, at age 75. Without Ellington tunes such as "In a Sentimental Mood," instrumental classics such as "Mood Indigo" and "Reminiscing in Tempo" and theatrical works such as "Jump for Joy" and "My People," American music would be much diminished.

Yet understanding the personality who created these works — and who stole credit for comparable achievements by his collaborator Billy Strayhorn and others — has proved far more difficult than evaluating his catalog. For Ellington was circumspect about how much, or how little, he revealed of himself to even those who worked with him for decades.

The latest author to attempt to crack the mystery, Terry Teachout, makes a heroic effort but concedes the problem from the outset.

"He talked not to explain himself but to conceal himself," writes Teachout in "Duke."

To Ellington's own musicians, Teachout adds a little later, "he was a riddle without an answer, an unknowable man who hid behind a high wall of ornate utterances and flowery compliments that grew higher as he grew older."

By the end of his tome, Teachout concedes simply: "Everyone knows him — yet no one knows him. That was the way he wanted it."

Even so, Teachout gives us valuable glimpses into Ellington's modus operandi and musical insights into some of the composer's significant works. If we never hear in Ellington's voice why he seized songwriting credit from Strayhorn and uncounted other colleagues, if we never come to understand how he felt about the women he promiscuously pursued, if we never fully sense the flesh-and-blood human being in "Duke," that indeed may be because that's how the composer wished it.

We do, however, get a better fix on exactly how Ellington built his celebrated big band and crafted some of his landmark compositions, especially when it comes to his earlier, shorter works. As Ellington's career developed and his musical ambitions expanded, he ventured into more expansive works that Teachout unpersuasively attempts to discount. In so doing, Teachout, alas, reveals more about his own cultural biases and blind spots than about Ellington's compositional idiosyncrasies and achievements.

Even so, the early chapters tracing the process by which Edward Kennedy Ellington invented Duke Ellington prove gratifying to read.

Pampered by his family in Washington, D.C., Ellington took piano lessons at 7 from the improbably named Marietta Clinkscales but didn't really hear the music until he was 13.

"There was no connection between me and music, until I started fiddling with it myself," he said. "As far as anyone teaching me, there was too many rules and regulations, and I just couldn't be shackled into that. As long as I could sit down and figure it out for myself, then that was all right."

Better than all right, considering that the high school dropout — a mostly self-taught musician — launched his career at a pivotal moment in American music: 1917, when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band released the first jazz record and helped ignite the Jazz Age. By the 1920s, young Ellington was leading an ensemble in New York and recruiting musicians who would help him redefine the meaning of jazz (a word he sometimes derided, but a music he defended).

"Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is the band," Strayhorn wrote. "Each member of his band is to him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I call the Ellington Effect."

That painterly approach to jazz composition was unprecedented before Ellington and made possible the fervent blues expressions of "East St. Louis Toodle-O," the glowing azure shadings of "Mood Indigo" and much more.

Teachout tells this part of the story well, interweaving the arrival of particular musicians in the band with the emergence of key compositions (most of which were inspired by motifs created by Ellington's men but arranged by — and credited to — Ellington, who took most of the royalties). As each player joined the instrumental fray, the ensemble sound became more complex, the compositions more daring, distinctive and satisfying.

Here lies the essential drama of Ellington's story and the essence of his first musical breakthroughs: his gift for assembling unique players and his wizardry at building revelatory compositions around them. But Ellington long bristled at the conventions of the three-minute song form and worked assiduously to break out of them. Works such as "Reminiscing in Tempo" (1935) and the epic "Black, Brown and Beige" (1943) showed him going where precious few jazz or classical composers had ventured before: extended compositions borrowing techniques from both worlds and inventing some along the way.

To this day, "Black, Brown and Beige" — a contemplation on race in America — holds a singular place in the literature, and to this day many critics deride it for allegedly failing to fulfill a variety of their prerequisites.

"Eight years after 'Reminiscing in Tempo,'" writes Teachout, in assessing "Black, Brown and Beige," "Ellington had yet to acquaint himself with the elementary principles of symphonic musical organization known to all classically trained composers, and it showed."

But who said that Ellington — who already had changed the way short jazz compositions were built — needed to emulate the way classical composers wrote extended works for large ensembles? Why would an innovator such as Ellington feel so obligated?

Teachout attempts to offer an explanation: "Yet it was Ellington's own decision to premiere the piece in the temple of the American classical-music establishment," he writes, referring to Carnegie Hall.

So Ellington was supposed to craft "Black, Brown and Beige" according to the practices of Beethoven and Brahms because Ellington chose to play his work at Carnegie Hall — which, by the way, had been spotlighting jazz and other folkloric music since Benny Goodman's celebrated concert there in 1938? Hardly.

Teachout hits this "not classical enough" point whenever he discusses Ellington's large works, and it becomes tiresome: It indicates a narrow way of viewing a composer who always was pushing beyond category. Toward the end of this tome, after repeatedly applying the same rigid, classical criteria to many of Ellington's large works, Teachout virtually dismisses them: "He was, like Chopin … a disciplined lyric miniaturist who knew how to express the grandest of emotions on the smallest of scales, and who needed no more room in which to suggest his immortal longings."

But Chopin wrote two of the most monumental piano sonatas of the entire repertory, as well as two sprawling piano concertos. To reduce Ellington to merely a miniaturist by invoking Chopin as an example illuminates the narrowness of Teachout's perspective on Chopin, Ellington and musical composition. In suggesting that George Gershwin didn't know how to put together his "Rhapsody in Blue" — again, because it didn't conform to previous classical models — Teachout further diminishes his credibility in this kind of musical analysis.

Still, one has to applaud Teachout for his eyes-wide-open view of Ellington, the author forthrightly documenting the composer's musical thefts, his abusive denial of credit to Strayhorn and what the author considers Ellington's tendency to manipulate others for his own benefit (not exactly an uncommon approach in show business). On strictly musical terms, Teachout performs a service by explaining how and why Ellington orchestrated in the way he did, how he struggled to craft memorable melody lines and how that particular challenge spurred him to become a better composer.

As America's musical tastes changed and Ellington's swing aesthetic was eclipsed by rock 'n' roll, the composer's fortunes ultimately declined: He is believed to have owed $600,000 to $700,000 in back taxes at the time of his death. In his closing chapters, Teachout — no longer able to chronicle one artistic triumph after another — produces a narrative that becomes perfunctory, episodic and a little dull, a sequence of events minus the inspiration of the earlier pages.

Perhaps Teachout was right after all: Ellington remains unknowable, his music transcending the through-line of his life and attempts to comprehend it.

Tribune arts critic/jazz critic Howard Reich has covered music for the newspaper since 1977 and joined the staff in 1983. He's the author of "Let Freedom Swing," "Jelly's Blues" (with William Gaines), "Prisoner of Her Past" and "Van Cliburn."